I contacted D. Emory a while back when I came across his paper sculpture, Spiky Baby. He graciously decided to go ahead and one-up himself by documenting a brand-new paper sculpture. I thought it would be fitting to run his story here. Give it up to Emory for cranking on this for us. I will post the papercraft project I worked on soon, as well.
By D.Emory Allen, Graphic designer/illustrator
ocularinvasion.com
With the recent designer vinyl toy explosion, more and more designers and illustrators are looking for a way to get their characters made into toys. Unfortunately for most, getting your character made into a vinyl toy can be a long and arduous road. The plush medium offers an alternative but in order to make a plush toy, you have to know how to sew. That’s where papercraft comes in.
Paper is available to everyone and your toys can be too. Paper provides not only a quick and easy way for you to make toys, but it also offers a quick and easy way to distribute your toys. After you design one, you can make your toy available through the internet free for anyone to download and build. You’re giving your fans a free toy and a sense of accomplishment, because they build it themselves.
There are a few downsides to paper, however. Paper is not as malleable as a plush toy. You can forget about anything spherical. Also, you must keep your toys simple. Otherwise your audience will lose patience, get frustrated, and forget your toy ever existed. The biggest drawback about paper toys is finding an audience. With a vinyl toy, a toy producer, like Kid Robot, is in charge of distributing your toy and making sure it sells. With paper, you’re on your own. If you only get 1,000 unique visits a month on your website, only those people are ever going to see your creation. Promoting yourself and your paper toy are key.
Now that you’ve decided that you want to give papercraft a try, let’s get started.
1. Build your own model or use someone else’s?
This is a very important question. Do you venture on your own and create a unique model and design that no one has seen before, or do you use someone else’s model and add your unique design to that? The first option is much harder, but gives you an opportunity to make your rules in every aspect of this project. However, you will be solely responsible for making sure people know the work you’ve done.
The second option is a much less time consuming route because someone has already done half of the work for you. Also, many places that provide a pre-made template also provide a gallery to show off how people have customized their model i.e., Shin Tanaka Ready Mech or Speaker Dog just to name a few. I recommend this option for those who aren’t comfortable with working with paper.
However, this tutorial is about creating your own model from scratch.
2. Pick a design
This is the part where you start sketching, or if you’re like me, you pick a character that you’ve already created in some other medium. I won’t go into detail about how to turn a sketch of a character into a computer illustration because I feel that Vonster has done a better job that than I could in this article at illustrationclass.com. The character I went with is one I created a couple months ago and his name is Marcos.
3. Sketch your model
The number one rule when creating a model is to keep it simple. Think modified cubes. Paper doesn’t like to make domes or spheres or anything bulbousy so It’s best to try to think of how you can make every part of your model have flat sides. I’m not saying it’s impossible to have curves but, as a beginner, it’s best to start simple. The people that download your toy will also thank you for it. Recently, a man named Mike McDermott created a replica of Master Chief completely out of paper. It ended up having over 2800 different planes. It makes for a great looking paper sculpture but it’s something very few people will want to take the time to build themselves.
In the image above, the first sketch was a straight forward interpretation of Marcos. It was pretty boring so in the second sketch I tried to go with a more action-filled pose; too complicated and therefore to hard to build. So finally I settled on the third sketch. It’s relatively simple but, by messing with proportion, it’s more interesting than the first sketch.
4. Build each part one by one
I started with the shoulder since I thought it would be the most difficult. According to the sketch, it would have 12 planes. I started by sketching on a piece of paper how I thought it would break down. Imagine a collapsed cardboard box, you want all of your pieces to be able to fold out flat. After sketching, I went to my computer, opened Illustrator, and started creating the shoulder. I would make a shoulder in Illustrator, print it out, try to build it, and head back to Illustrator because it didn’t work out the way I wanted. I went through this process for every part of the body. The image above shows just a few of the prototypes I created for various body parts.
Eventually I gave up on creating a small shoulder with many little folds. I combined the arm and shoulder into one piece that ended up only having 9 planes. Remember, people who try to build your toy will thank you for keeping it simple.
The most trying part of my toy was the head. I wanted a dome head but I just couldn’t get it to work. I tried and tried but eventually gave up and went searching. Hoping to learn from what other people had done, I looked for other paper toys that had a dome design that I wanted. Nothing. Well I did find a cactus paper sculpture that had a dome but it wasn’t simple enough. The next best thing I could find was a hexagon.
5. Put all of the pieces together
Assemble all of the parts just to make sure you’re happy with your model. Something you might run into at this stage is the issue of balance. If you have something sticking out of the front of your model, you have to make sure you have something preventing your model from falling forward. For my model, Marcos, I had to angle the legs back slightly so that the weight was more evenly distributed.
6. The boring part
You can skip this step if you don’t plan on making your toy available for anyone to download. This is where you take all of those pieces that you built in Illustrator and prepare them so people can understand how to use them. Standard practice is to use a dashed line to indicate folding and a solid line for places to cut. I’ve used solid gray boxes to indicate where separate parts should be glued to each other. View image A versus image B. An extra step you might want to take is creating a solid shape for each plane (image C). If you do this, you can distribute a blank template that will be easy for other designers to customize.
Make sure to include your design on 8.5 in x 11 in paper to make sure it can be printed on a standard printer. One page is ideal but more is fine.
7. Skinning your model
Now that you’ve spent all that time prepping your template, it should be easy to drop in your design.
8. The fun part
Print out your design, build it, and take pictures!
9. Final steps
To make sure that your design gets out to, and is understood by, as many people as possible, create a PDF of your work with instructions. Normally saying “cut on solid lines, fold on dashed lines, and glue pieces together” is enough. Matt Hawkins of custompapertoys.com includes step-by-step instructions with all of his toys.
Well that’s all there is to it (to say that is misleading because it can take quite some time to create a custom model).
Warning: I should have listened to my own advice better. Building it is a little more complex and time consuming than I would’ve liked. While the rule is keep it simple, it’s ultimately up to you to decide how far you want to bend it.
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